Monday, December 14, 2015

I. Howard Marshall (1934-2015)

I was sorry to hear of the death of I. Howard Marshall over the weekend. He was 81. Marshall was a prolific scholar and he will be fondly remembered, especially the generations of evangelical students he trained at the University of Aberdeen.

I was lucky to get to know him a little after his retirement because he was a regular at the British New Testament Conference. He had been president of the society, and his name was on the bank account. He always showed great humour when I asked him to sign all our cheques. He said that he enjoyed spending other people's money.

Prof. Marshall was always encouraging and gracious to younger scholars. I remember in particular his kindness in providing feedback on a paper I gave on the first beatitude, which later became Chapter 7 of The Case Against Q. He was not at all convinced! Like most evangelicals of the day, including his teacher F. F. Bruce, he was wedded to Q. I have often consulted his commentary on Luke, which may be his finest and most important book.

I first saw Prof. Marshall on TV, when I was a teenager. He was interviewed for the Channel 4 programme Jesus: The Evidence, which also featured Geza Vermes, Helmut Koester, Werner Kümmel and Morton Smith. I have extracted the minute or so that features Howard Marshall and uploaded to Youtube here:

It was something of a cause célèbre at the time among evangelicals that Prof. Marshall only received a minute or so compared to the many minutes given to Geza Vermes, George Wells and others!

There is also a lecture on Youtube from Acadia University:

It is from 2002 (uploaded in 2012) and the topic is "The Interpretation of the Bible and Development of Theology." Over on Biblical Studies Online, Deane Galbraith has gathered together a series of Prof. Marshall's lectures from 1991, the Moore College Lectures on A Fresh Look at the Acts of the Apostles: